going once, twice, thrice .. submitted?

November 18, 2006 12:52 AM

Help me host an auction on my laptop!

I'm hosting a four-hour long auction, not live, in which people can walk up to me and give in auction slips that I will then input. My laptop will be connected to a projector in which the prices of certain artwork will cycle through and be updated.

Is there any good way to do it? I'm using a Powerbook, by the way. I'm currently thinking of using a powerpoint presentation and updating the images in the slides with photoshop, but is there a better way to do it? Maybe use a perl script to use imagemagick? Does anyone have experience with this?

Thank you hive mind!

posted by suedehead to Technology (3 answers total)

I think you should be able to do this with html and client redirections.

You have N pages for your N items, and you could add to each page add a meta refresh, on a timer, to page N+1. The pages should cycle. If you need something a little more complicated, I bet javascript would be able to do it.
posted by cotterpin at 7:38 AM on November 18, 2006

A quick google search on html meta refresh produced a page illustrating what I was talking about.
posted by cotterpin at 7:40 AM on November 18, 2006

Use keynote on the external "screen" hooked up to the projector. Then use neooffice or excel to keep track of bids as they come in. You don't have to think about keynote doing it's thing, just make sure each slide has an identifying piece number so they can get in.

As for the updating price on the projection, that's harder. See if keynote can import data from somewhere, and if changing the underlying data changes the slides in real time. Now that'd be cool....
posted by cschneid at 9:38 AM on November 18, 2006